President Ricciardone Responds to AUC Challenges

By: The Caravan
@Caravan_AUC

The Caravan’s Editor-in-Chief Dania Akkawi sat down with AUC President Francis Ricciardone on Wednesday, February 20 to talk about some of the main issues concerning the community, such as communication, tenure, the Faculty Handbook, the University Senate, and the Centennial celebrations on campus.

Below is the full version of the interview. Readers can also click on the links to jump to specific topics discussed during the interview. The video below contains excerpts from the interview.

Faculty Handbook
Four-Year Term
The Centennial

Communication and Tenure:

Akkawi: I understand that post- the vote of no confidence, faculty senate meetings and after the student presentations that took place in the cafeteria, there has been a series of meetings to establish a dialogue between, the administration, Board of Trustees and the students, where have these meetings reached up to now?

Ricciardone: They are in progress. I would say progress is the right word.

It’s not so much a dialogue if you’re thinking of dialogue literally with two parties. It’s a multi party conversation that needed to be better, needed to improve and be more fruitful in terms of the output of the communications… the channels needed to be improved. There’s a saying, ‘never waste a good crisis.’ This isn’t really a crisis, this is a tempest in a teapot sort of thing.

On our university, there’s a lot of anxiety and high emotions and so some people feel it’s a crisis. But it is not a life or death thing for the university. The topic is an important one, how do we go from good to great? How do we improve our communications? How do we collaborate better? How do we build trust? I love the fact that the students took advantage of the lunch we set up with trustees for the very purpose we set it up. We did it because the trustees, administration and I, we all wanted to get a student’s eye view, not as in the past you know over a nice lunch at the president’s house, but actually where the students eat lunch.

So start with complaining about the food if that’s what you want to do because that’s a valid complaint.

We really want to hear from them individually and then when a student union group kind of took it over, it overcame the individual conversations we could’ve had but it was interesting for all of us to hear the student perspectives, including the anger and all of that. Most of us came away feeling good about that. I certainly did.

The students, although they said they were feeling intimidated, they were demonstrating by their actions that they weren’t intimidated. They were true AUCians. We were succeeding in the educational mission to encourage students to think critically and speak, communicate, articulate things.

If there was a disappointing element, it was to see that there’s a lot more educating to do.

What do you mean?

What I perceived, and what many of the trustees perceived was, these students feel very strongly about really important issues: quality of education and communications and so forth. They however, it felt kind of spontaneous which is good. There can be impact in spontaneity but not really well prepared and as coherent as it should be.

So I think it was a good conversation starter and actually conversation was already going on. Now what we need to do is have groups of people working together, one by one, on the issues. Let’s get data. One of the things was ‘oh the quality of education is deteriorating and the selectivity numbers’…They were throwing around numbers that need fact checking and definition because, they are not the numbers I’ve heard. Our selectivity in an admissions sense has actually been improving in recent years. It’s not easy to get into AUC.

We have selectivity numbers that are enviable in American higher ed for schools of our size. But there must be something there. Those students must have found something. I would like to know what are you trying to say? Precisely. Where’s the data? And when you say the quality of education is deteriorating, that really is critically important for me. Let’s get the evidence behind that and then let’s figure out what do we do to address, either the reality, if it is reality, or the perceptions and sometimes perceptions are even more important than the reality.

How does something like this get addressed, if the quality of education deteriorates? From what I understand, the board of trustees is more concerned with financial matters. But I also understand that they have a student affairs committee. Can you tell us more about this?

The fact is that the Board of Trustees does much more than just budget. And to the extent they focus on budget it isn’t ‘How do we save money or increase fees?’ It is on the contrary. ‘How do we make sure we’re dedicating the resources to the quality of education?’ and by education, they mean not only coursework, but they mean the whole student experience.

They spent time going to the residences and looking at off campus sites to build more residencies. They spent time looking at athletics, a lot of time looking at the new arts center downtown, looking at the downtown campus and all of our facilities here, looking at the long term needs of this university, not only from a budget perspective but, what are our priorities. And beyond any dispute, the priority is quality of education. We cannot compete…we do not compete in Egypt on price. We are far and away the most expensive in terms of tuition. That means we have to be far and away the best. We have to be world quality.

And again this is a point I’d like to engage the students with. I’d like to get a task force of students faculty and staff together on this.

We have structures in place to do this routinely every day because the provost counsel, the deans the chairs.. their job every day is to make sure we have high quality education.

Part of my job is to make sure we get the resources behind the priorities to identify emerging academic disciplines, fin-tech, for example, is something we’ve added here, and put resources behind it, get new resources.. innovation hubs, things as such.

But I’d love to get a task force that really focuses on quality of education. If students are perceiving that educational quality is diminishing. To me, that’s a big red flag. Students always complain, they should complain. We need effective channels to handle complaints to really pay attention to them. And that is something we have been working on with with new administrative talent including our new compliance officer and general counsel.

On quality of education, we need to get data and analysis. We need it from a 360 degree perspective. We need the students perspective because they are in, I hate to use business terms because we’re not a business, we are a busy-ness. We are an industry. We are an activity for a high human purpose. It is not about making money. It is not a for profit business. The students are our primary focus. That card I always use, ‘student centered, faculty led, staff enabled’. The student perception matters and how that comports to the reality is another a subsidiary question.

If students are thrilled to be here, feeling challenged, feeling stretched, feeling pressed a little bit, you know not just coasting, but feeling like they’re growing and they’re excited intellectually, that’s great. That’s what we need. If the faculty perceive that they’re doing their best and they’re keeping our every department measured by world standards of accreditation, that’s really important. That is where the faculty leadership comes in.

Only a professor in their field will know whether her department, her colleagues, her own work is measuring up to the global standards in her field, whether it’s biology or history or chemistry or philosophy or business or any other area of study.

And all this requires communication between all the parties. So, going back to the student presentations again. A lot of the students mentioned, I think as well faculty in the faculty meetings, that there was difficulty reaching the administration and board of trustees. Meaning that, one of the students said the process of sending emails back and forth, he sees it as a hindrance to communication. What is your take on this or how can this be addressed?

You know emails are in a way outmoded. I think most of us find our e-mail inboxes are hopelessly full.

I think the most valuable and impactful communication is what we’re doing now. It’s eyeball to eyeball where people are sitting down and saying here’s the issue, ‘what do you think, what do I think, how do we collaborate if we can. Can we collaborate on attacking a problem and resolving it?’ For me, that’s the highest form. When you think about it, that is the most expensive in terms of your time and my time, two people actually getting together. The cheapest is email..15 second you read it, you hit send and you delete it.

So the trick is how to maximize the value we take out of every hour, every minute of the day with people who are really concerned about issues, whether it’s clients and receivers of services, or those who are providing the services and those who are getting the resources to the service providers to give it to the service users.

So organizing to do that really matters. The structures to do that really matter. So we have formal structures. I just mentioned the Provost council, that’s a critically important one, the Deans, the chairs, the members of the faculty and the Senate is really important.

Is the Senate an option for better communication?

It should be….more than an option. I think it’s vitally important. It’s formal, in that is formally recognized and it has a recognized existence. However, it is not accountable in the way that, say the president, the provost, the deans and the chairs are accountable.

If the chair performs well, she will be recognized and rewarded. If an individual faculty member is performing in teaching and research, she or he, will get credit for that… will receive tenure or if it’s not a tenure track, it’s somebody who is on a contract, that contract will be renewed. They may pick pay bonuses.

Faculty don’t just work for pay, they want appreciation and recognition and the ability to go to conferences and share what they know and learn from others. So for people who are performing, those kinds of rewards, both in terms of compensation and in terms of recognition, will flow. If one is not performing, whether staff or faculty, at the level of president or on down, then you know…. one’s job, ultimately, if you’re seriously under-performing, could be in peril. You won’t get those rewards, you won’t get the extra pay.

So setting up the systems of accountability really matter. And again, that’s where the chairs evaluate the performance of their department colleagues, the deans evaluate the performance of their chairs, the provost evaluates deans, and so on down the line in the academic area.

From where I sit, I’m not involved in those evaluations. I make sure we have good systems.

But not directly on the professors evaluation?

No I don’t really do that. It’s the academic area and the academic system. So the whole tenure question, for example that’s one of the ones that faculty is concerned about, the provost took a great initiative when this was a controversy going back a couple of years when one of the faculty…

Professor Sean McMahon?

Yes. It’s not an automatic thing that you get tenure just because you’re on a tenure track. It is a high pressure thing.

We need to have a rigorous process in place that has validity and when that process works out, ideally you want to hire people into a tenure track that will succeed and you want them to come out the other end tenured. But inevitably some will make it and some won’t.

There’s a good and rigorous process now in place. The controversial one of a couple years ago led the trustees and myself to question how good is our process? How valid is it? And Provost Abdel-Rahman undertook a really good initiative over a year ago. He said ‘let’s get together, leading academics from the best American universities, and study how our tenure processes compare to those in the United States. Let’s find out what the best practices are and adopt them here.’

It took a while to line that up. They came to campus last May. They met with everybody who wanted to see them and they produced a report… a very insightful report on how things are working at AUC and how they work in the United States and what the benchmarks are.

The Provost took that report sent it to a faculty working group which is analyzing the report and sending back recommendations to the provost. I haven’t seen that yet. I saw the original report, I thought it was excellent. I had questions about it. But my main question is, how how do we measure up to the best practices on tenure in the US? And I eagerly await the provost’s forwarding to me of the faculty working group in response to that expert thing.

So that’s how, it is going back to original communications. Let’s look at facts. Let’s get expert analysis and together, let’s figure out how we make this university go from good to great.

Faculty Handbook

On the issue of the Faculty Handbook:

What is the role of the faculty senate now and post-all these meetings because, during the meetings, I know that some of them expressed feeling low morale, that they weren’t involved, that their role was diminished. Is this true or what is your take on that?

I accept as valid what people feel and perceive. I never say somebody is wrong to perceive what they do.

But what is their role now?

The role of the senator is clear in terms of AUC’s standing. I mean our bylaws and so forth. The bylaws don’t mention the Senate but the authority of the Board of Trustees has been clarified. Again, they say never waste a good crisis to the extent this was a crisis, the trustees have now clarified and removed any ambiguity about the authority to administer the university.

It’s not just authority in the sense of the ability to give orders. It’s the responsibility. It’s the accountability. The trustees are accountable when there’s a lawsuit over tuition or over a tenure case or something like that. I am accountable as president.

Nobody in the Senate is accountable. If there’s a system’s failure, if there’s an I.T. failure, if there’s an H.R. system’s failure, if there’s a budget deficit or if there is a lawsuit over tuition nobody sues the Senate.

No senator is accountable for decision. So there’s a big difference between the authority and the responsibility and accountability of the Senate. It is a really important advisory body that has unique expertise and connectivity across our constituencies. So it’s important. It has a role that is vitally important to the well-being, the good order, discipline and running of the university. But at the end of the day, it does not have the authority to take to direct resources, to take policy decisions. It can make recommendations and it can give advice which is really important and really valuable and really necessary. But at the end of the day it is a different thing from the administration and the Board of Trustees. So I think that’s been clarified.

What called this into question was the whole faculty handbook.

Has there been any discussion on declaring the faculty handbook of 2015 as binding as this was one of the requests from the way forward resolution?

Yes, there’s been in fact way too much discussion of it. That’s been the problem. When it was cast in those binary terms, ‘Is it binding or not binding?,’ I think it led us into a kind of blind alley and the question was posed to me that way. Members of the Senate pose it to me that way in my very first senate meeting and I tried to clarify the point that, we need a faculty handbook that accurately reflects the terms and conditions of employment for faculty members. We need to have that clear. It’s a policy document that exists that every good organization has. There needs to be some flexibility. It needs to be changeable in response to changing conditions and it has to be a point of reference in people’s contractual agreements with the employer, no question. So it is valid. What is more deeply binding than anything is our shared commitment to this university whether we’re faculty, staff, or trustees.

People kept on ‘but is it binding, is it binding, is it a part of the contract?’ When we looked into it, we found out that first of all there were contradictions. There were ambiguities. We didn’t have a general counsel at the time that was drafted. There was no legal review of that at the time it was drafted. So it shouldn’t be surprising that there are errors that don’t comply with U.S. law and wouldn’t hold up in court.

In particular, there’s an issue about the aggregation to the faculty senate, a fiduciary responsibility that belongs exclusively to the trustees. That part is not legal. That part does not hold.. cannot hold, but just because that part doesn’t work doesn’t mean the rest isn’t needed, useful, and in fact, accurate enough, as a statement of commitments and requirements in both directions.

So, this goes back to your question, is it binding or not, that part that says the Senate has the authority of the trustees, or implies that at least, nothing can be changed without the Senate approving it, that part is not binding. It is legally not right, but that’s an important issue. We clarify that and the rest that captures the benefits, pay and compensation. We had a clarifying statement by the trustees in January of last year of 18 saying we’re not looking to take away any compensation and benefits from people who are currently enjoying those, don’t worry, we’re committing to that. So let’s park that and let’s work on getting a first class faculty handbook together.

This is currently what the university is working on?

So I’ve been here two and a half years. It was an issue before I arrived between the board of trustees, the previous administration and the faculty. Going back to 2015. So when I came, it’s something I set to work on with the previous provost and our current excellent provost.

We engaged the top United States expert on faculty handbooks, to serve, not the administration to serve the working group consisting of faculty members, members of the Senate including Senate leadership and several trustees, myself and the provost. As a practical matter, it’s been the provost leading it with the faculty members and I’ve come in from time to time with the trustees to to support.

That process predated me but when I arrived, we tried to strengthen it. We had a change in the chairman of the board last year but that Chairman and the current chairman…

Atef Eltoukhy and now Richard Bartlett?

Yes. They had been personally involved, as has our vice chairman, who is one of the United States top academics. He is the provost of Caltech, California’s Institute of technology. You don’t get a higher ranking, more credible academic expert than that.

We have others on the academic affairs committee who have been involved from George Washington University for example. So there has been a process in place. We’ve taken our time, it’s academia. Things take time.

The first real meeting of that committee with the outside expert, who has read 200 faculty handbooks and sorted out a much worse crisis with New University in New York 10 years ago, that started in April of 2017 and through various ups and downs, time has passed.

With this latest, again mini crisis, if you want to call it a crisis, the trustees have clarified who has what authority and have directed that we should bring the consultations to a close and have a good solid draft.

We hope it will be one that everybody agrees on in the next couple of weeks so that we can present something.

In the next faculty senate meeting?

We want to present it of course to the Senate, but I want to have this expert review in the United States because I want this to be a model. I’d love for people who are also struggling with faculty handbooks around the world to take the AUC example as an inspiration. ‘How did AUC solve this issue of faculty compensation versus quality of instruction, quality research, allocation of resources, legal standings, legal authorities?’

You know, this is not peculiar to AUC. In most of American higher education, Senates are considered faculty Senates rather than university Senates because they’re dominated by faculty, and handbooks like this focus on academic affairs, and senates focus on academic affairs, quality of instruction, quality of recruitment and retention of faculty and so forth.

So, I’m very optimistic. We’ve got a process. We’ve got a vision. We’ve put in two years of a lot of effort into it. There’s been a lot of emotion and so forth. That’s fine. It’s normal. I’m very optimistic that we’re going to have an exemplary handbook by the time we’re effective. I dare hope now, I always avoid predictions but I really dare to hope that we’ll have this resolved in a way that people will say, ‘boy this was painful but was worth it. We’ve come out with something we all we all can live by.’

Four-Year Term

On Ricciardone’s plans as AUC President:

Do you plan on continuing after your four year term is over?

There is no four year term. There is no set term. You can read the bylaws about the appointment of the president. It doesn’t refer to a president’s term of any set number of years.

How does it work?

There was a recruitment process. I had no idea the job was open I wasn’t looking for it. I interviewed several times and back and forth and I finally decided I just can’t stay away from Egypt. This country’s too exciting. I have a kind of personal relationship with this country from before. It’s just too exciting.

What’s going to happen next year is so important not just for this country but for the world. And there’s such great possibilities and yet there’s big risks and threats. So I saw a very nice life in Washington in a think tank but I couldn’t stay away from here.

So we negotiated the terms and you know, they wanted me to stay longer and I said ‘you know, I am where I am in life and I’ll commit to four years.’ And they wanted it to be longer and we finally settled for four. But they said they’d hoped it would be longer.

I feel a long way from finished. There’s so much to accomplish here. I feel a turn. People say, but I don’t know, that the university was good but kind of drifting. And now there’s a focus and a direction. I can see reforms. They’re taking root.

There’s a lot more to do. And I would feel I can’t run out on this. I’m too committed to the people that I serve and I enjoy working with the people that are here. The Board is keen to have me stay longer and we will in the right time, we will make an announcement about that. But let me just reassure you, if it is reassuring to you that, I am committed to this place.

The Centennial Celebrations

On the Centennial Celebrations:

So you’re here around the time of the centennial celebrations at AUC, so what does that mean to you as a president?

I feel very lucky because, as I hope the students do, it’s exciting. It’s a human thing. It’s artificial. It’s like having a birthday. It’s a day like any other but when it’s your birthday, you reflect on the past year, you reflect on the future, where are you in life and what you are doing.

So here, as an institution, it is something bigger than any of us. Hardly any of us, will get to live to be a 100 years and you think about what the university witnessed in terms of Egypt and its changes. We were founded the month before the first real nationalist revolution against the British since the American revolution. We were born at the same time when modern Egypt was, a time of dynamism and excitement. We’ve been here through the departure of the monarchy, the establishment of the republic, changes of leaders, wars, peace, economic expansion and economic crises. We’ve been here through all of that.

We’ve gone through a small, downtown campus that had a certain character that people remember fondly to a world class institution with American accreditation, one of only four accredited American universities in the region, and multiple accreditations of our individual schools and departments. Going back to our ground for competition, we compete globally, we compete on quality not on price. We have the certifications, including the Egyptian certifications. We are the only Egyptian university that has Egyptian national accreditation.

So we’ve gone through so much in these hundred years. We’ve achieved so much. So it is wonderful to be here at this time and celebrate what we did in the past.

What do you think the role of AUC was in Egypt the past hundred years? How do you think it impacted the country?

It came with a mission of service to bring world education, particularly this american idea- of inquiry based education, liberal arts educations, multidisciplinary education, not just professional training for a job. Yes, that too. But education in english so people can access a world of information and knowledge out there. That’s where we started and, of course, we are still doing that.

But at the same time, especially the past half century I will say, we helped Egypt, in a way, educate the rest of the world. If you are a foreigner like me, who is interested in the world, I was a fulbright student. Before I graduated, I had two terms abroad, one in Italy and one in France. That just lit a fire in me. It made me hungry to learn about the rest of the world. So I applied for, and received, a Fulbright scholarship that took me to Italy and that set me on a lifelong path of learning outside my home come country. When you do this outside your home country in a foreign language, it just blows open your mind. So, AUC has been that portal for those who want to learn about not only Egypt, but also the Arab world.

Where else would you go if you’re an American or now Chinese? Or African? Or Italian? And you want to learn about the Arab and Muslim world. Where else would you go but Egypt? The biggest Arab country and one of the biggest Muslim countries. It’s the heart of the Arab and Muslim world. It is also most welcoming. There is layer after layer after layer of culture and history. It is the fountainhead of creativity.

Egypt is where the great composers and singers of modern times and classical times, the great writers, authors, poets, theater, film, the great teachers, educational reformers, Taha Hussein, the judges and men of state who went to the rest of the Arab world to help them build their justice systems, this is the fountainhead of all that.

There are other countries that compete to bring foreigners to study and they are lovely places to go, but this is where you want to come if you are a foreigner if you want to learn Arabic or study Islamic art and architecture or contemporary film or contemporary painting and sculpture.

Do you have any final thoughts on the centennial or the vote of no confidence and everything we’ve discussed?

You know, after that vote, I said, the one word I said for it was ‘unfortunate’. It was unnecessary. There is another way people could have expressed those feelings. They could have delayed and waited until the trustees arrived. They didn’t. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. It is now past.

The trustees had spoken unanimously and respectfully and now we have settled an issue about authorities. This doesn’t change the fact that I am committed to this place, that the trustees are committed to this place, the faculty is committed. We have a common interest in the good of this university and taking it from good to great. It’s not just the faculty and administration, the students too of course. We have a worldwide network of supporters in our alumni and donors.

For me, that was kind of a mini moment of crisis. We didn’t waste it. When the trustees came, they came to campus, they engaged with students directly 101 and as it turns out, as a group in the cafeteria. Communication happened. We had dinners with faculty members in small settings. We had meetings with the executive committee of the senate.

We had to wait a day to see President El Sisi on the 13th. So that gave us the 12th to check out some new sites in Egypt. We visited the grand Egyptian museum under construction. We visited the newly opened tomb. Partly for love Egypt and partly to show the rest of the world that it’s safe and exciting to be here.

We are all coming from the United States and others should too. We invited several faculty members and some of them did. We had lots of opportunities for formal and informal meetings.